“Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion,” Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote at the conclusion of The Worst Journey in the World, his classic account of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s failed bid to claim the South Pole—a work generally regarded as the finest book on exploration ever written.
Not so, according to Matthew Lockwood, who argues in his new book, Explorers: A New History, that our tendency “to think of explorers, unlike mere travelers, as selfless figures who voyage in pursuit of knowledge and adventure” is simplistic and ignores the historic entanglement of exploration with imperialism. Rejecting “the heroic image” of the explorer as a “khaki-clad adventurer hacking his way through a tangled jungle” that haunts popular culture, he observes that “it is tempting to discard the terms ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration’ altogether, to consign studies of explorers to the dustbin of history.”
